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“…in our land our women have to see the same,” extremist rhetoric

The Woolwich attacker stated,” I apologise that women had to witness this today. But in our land, our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you.” This was described as characteristic of jihadist discourse in the media.

I wish to demonstrate that such rhetoric is not solely used by jihadist extremists, but is characteristic of texts from other extremist movements.

I will do so by analyzing a corpus of the Turner Diaries.

The Turner Diaries is a novel written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce (a white supremacist leader) which depicts a violent revolution in the United States and a race war leading to the extermination of all “impure” groups such as Jews, gay people, and non-whites. The book has been described as a “bible of the racist right” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The novel has been linked to a number of violent crimes committed by white separatists such as Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing.

By using WordSmith (Version 6) I can calculate the key words in the white supremacist text:

As can be seen the word with the 3rd highest level of keyness if OUR, a word which was very prominent in the Woolwich attacker’s utterances.

If I wished to look at the collocates of OUR, I find the following:

From this it can be seen that PEOPLE collocates the most frequently with OUR and so a look at the concordance lines of this phrase may be insightful.

The concordance lines demonstrate a strong construction of us/them groups, which may be seen as characteristic for a racist text. However, there is also a very clear semantic prosody related to the victimization of the in-group, as the following lines demonstrate:

killed one of our people

our people are being killed

picking off our people

When our people first began to disappear

our people have been badly roughed up

four of our people have been killed by snipers

a much greater harm will ultimately befall our people

From this brief study of an extremist text, an observation may be made that not only jihadist discourse construct an in-group as being victimized, other radical groups or texts such as the one I have presented here appear to use a similar strategy in order to justify their actions or beliefs.